December 27, 2012

Thoughts and Stuff

I haven't been updating here, because of Twitter and Facebook and such, and because my last job interview included someone who referenced my blog, which was disconcerting at first, but then I thought "This blog saved my sanity. . . sort of. . . so, well, shit."

Here's some Facebook missives and such.

(And, there is a reason for all this oddness)

MONDAY

I flipped channels to "The Fellowship of the Ring" yesterday afternoon, during the epic stand of Boromir against the orcs, during which Boromir became an archer's pin cushion and the NFL linebacker orc had his head removed by Aragorn. And I suddenly realized Aiden had been sitting next to me watching the whole scene. I looked at him, and he had this ashen pallor to his face, and his mouth was half agape.

ME: "Yo Gabba Gabba" has taken a dark turn, huh, bud?

AIDEN: *harsh whisper* Yeah. . .

SUNDAY

Spent the morning watching vehicles attempt to go up the ice-slicked hill in front of our house. Nothing quite like the look of near-helpless driver panic as they try to navigate a vehicle sliding backwards into an intersection.

WEDNESDAY

It's not that I ask too much from computer techs, but if I bring my wife's computer in for a boot loop hard drive back-up, I generally expect them to plug the hard drive back into the motherboard and, even though floppy drives are a thing of the past, admittedly, they could plug those back in, too. Sure, I can do both, and it's easy, but it's the little easy things that count.

AND

I've never watched an episode of "Cougar Town," but during every promo, I think "Dang, that blond girl has some smokin' legs!" You know what her name is? Busy Philipps." Busy. Her name is Busy. Talk about a word losing all meaning.

Abrasion My Eye

Twas the night before Christmas Eve, and all I could see,
was out my left eye. How the heck could that be?

OK, seriously, I couldn't see out my right eye, which was deeply red, tearing up uncontrollably, and basically useless as a sight-enabling orb. And I had absolutely no explanation as to why my once dutifully-performing eye had decided to go all mutinous on me.

The pain and discomfort was such that I went to bed very early that night, only to wake up Christmas Eve morning with an eye welded shut with pain and sensitivity to light.

When my eyes are working normally, I basically take having two of them completely for granted; but when I'm down to one functioning eye, I wonder why evolution didn't build a little more redundancy into the whole seeing system--is a THIRD eye really too much to ask? At the very least, the name of the band "Third Eye Blind" would make some sort of reasonable sense.

One of the last places I want to go on Christmas Eve is the local emergency room. After all, there's a good reason why there are no Christmas songs about filling out E.R. admittance forms--well, as far as I know. Regardless, the inexplicable pain in my eye was such that I was actually fearing going blind in my right eye, which would have been way worse than a lump of coal, so off to the E.R. I went.

I don't know why, but I'm always somewhat surprised to discover I'm last on the triage list when I go to the E.R. Sure, my eye problem was very important and immediate to me, but that guy on the gurney with the bone protruding from his thigh somehow managed to score a better E.R. ticket than me, so he got to go in first, the big baby.

After being officially admitted into the E.R., a nurse administered a couple drops of awesome sauce into my eye, after which I felt no pain whatsoever. Sure, I still couldn't see anything, but with no more discomfort it seemed like a fair tradeoff. As far as I was concerned, I could order a gallon of whatever that eye drop stuff was and be on my blind little way.

Alas, no, the folks at the E.R. insisted I should stick around so they could "diagnose" my eye, which is medical jargon for "take a guess." According to their best guess, I had a corneal abrasion (scratched eye), stemming from when my two-year-old daughter whacked me with her "Toy Story" Woody doll a couple evenings earlier. Apparently, Woody is a fairly abrasive doll.

I will neither confirm nor deny the E.R. diagnosis. I will say, however, that my eye apparently disagreed with their best guess.